Trebor Daehdoow
Dirt Nap Squad
Dirt Nap Squad.
2256
   |
Posted - 2012.09.12 10:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
Just a few observations.
CCP Xhagen wrote:I also agree that increasing the requirements to get on the ballot is needed. The test during the last election showed that it weeded out some candidates (I cannot remember the exact number), so putting it higher with a slight change to the system should be the way to go.
While increasing the requirements modestly isn't a bad thing, putting a hard limit on the number of candidates on the ballot (as some have suggested) will be trivially gamed. Who needs to stuff the ballot box when you can just stuff the ballot itself?
For this reason, I would simply modestly tighten the current system that by requiring both a modest registration fee (a few PLEX) and obtaining some number of unique posts in the candidate's nomination thread. If you post in the thread, you are endorsing the candidate; only your earliest post in any nomination thread counts, so each account gets a single endorsement. CSM already has similar scripts to handle this kind of thing that we use on crowdsourcing efforts.
This is still trivially gameable but at least it requires a little more effort. And it still doesn't solve the fundamental problem (see below).
Courthouse wrote:No, because your premise is flawed. How do you quantify what a "fair representation of EVE" is? ... This is a political process and should be reflective of that reality.
Something to keep in mind is that while the elections themselves are good dirty political fun, the actual work of the CSM is rarely political; we act mostly as an (allegedly) expert focus group and (to varying degrees) ombudsmen, not as the political masters of some Department of Pod-pilot Affairs.
As such, the "fair representation" goal should, IMHO, be a "fair representation of the different player subpopulations", which is not quite the same thing as a "fair representation of the electorate" in RL democratic terms. Ideally, CCP would like to have a CSM diverse enough in terms of interests such that no matter what topic is placed before the CSM, there will be at least 3-4 active CSM members with experience in that area.
This would not be so much of an issue if everyone who gets elected to CSM was able to put in the hours needed to do the job properly. The sad fact, however, is that being an active CSM is always time-consuming, sometimes tedious, and often a thankless task, and RL inevitably gets in the way. The end result is that in every CSM, 75+% of the work gets done by 5 or 6 members.
Raising the percentage of active members and increasing the number of active members that have a good grasp of any particular game area are important goals of election reform. In particular, there is a pool of knowledgeable, hard-working potential candidates who are discouraged from running because (for example) they feel they'd just act as a spoiler. It is these candidates that I personally would like to see encouraged to run by a system that permitted some of them to bubble up into the lower slots in the council, where they will have the opportunity to prove their worth. Guys like Two step and Hans are good examples of this process in action; we need more of them.
Whatever some of you may think about the system I described in the other thread, when you compare it in practice with the current system, the differences in outcome would be largely concentrated in the lower positions.
Pirokobo wrote:I assure you that we have scrutinized Trebor's single-transferable-vote system and have come up with a way to exploit it to hell and back to completely stack the csm with nullsec candidates.
I am sure we would all be very interested if you would describe the methodology, rather than just blithely state that there is one, since if you are correct, then full STV (which seems to be popular with your comrades) would be even more exploitable. It will be interesting to see if it would produce better/more reliable results than what is possible under the current system when you have the advantage of reasonably accurate vote management.
The Sarcasm is Strong with Me GÇó Member of CSM 5-7 GÇó Blog |